Skip to main content

Welcome


Thank you for coming to the Paperback Show website. I've spent the last six months creating episodes for the podcast and am delighted to finally be sharing them with everyone. 

My name is Ricky Lee Grove. I've been working in bookstores for over 40 years. As I relate in Ep 1 of the Paperback Show, I got my first job in a used paperback bookstore near my home. I love books and have been collecting them for decades. Paperbacks are my particular passion. Over the years, I've amassed a large collection of paperbacks many of them are vintage (from the 40s,50s and 60s). I started selling books online via Amazon and Ebay several years ago and just recently created  a store that will service this Podcast. The store is called Grove Used Books and I set it up on Big Cartel which looks so great. I've got about 75 hand-picked titles in the store right now, but hope to bring up the total to 500 over this year (2022). 

I'll be offering special discounts and freebies to listeners of the Paperback Show podcast and will feature new books for every episode. Look for the links the show notes or click the tab "Grove Used Books" at the top of this site. 

I love reading and spend hours every day just living inside of a good book. I don't have any particular favorites, so my range of subjects is quite wide. If I were pushed to decide, I'd probably say science fiction is my favorite. My only real criteria for reading a book is that should be good. As I've gotten older, I have no patience for books that are badly written or filed with racism or bias. Out it goes!

I'll be sharing new episodes of the Paperback Show approximately every two weeks, although that timeline may vary depending upon the length of the show. 

Look for complete show notes in every episode where I share my research on books and authors featured. I also have a link to my favorite links. One thing I'll be doing is sharing a lot of paperback book covers in blog posts and for each episode. I have no copyright on the covers (most have vanished anyway), so feel free to copy or download. 

Thanks for reading this. I'll see you at a bookstore sometime. I'm the guy trying to balance a dozen paperbacks while reaching for another one on the shelf!

Ricky Lee Grove

Popular posts from this blog

Ep 17- Bantam, Louis L'amour and the Paperback Western

Ian Ballantine  was a young graduate student in 1939. He wrote a thesis on the economics of the paperback industry in the late 1930s that brought him to the attention of several paperback publishers. He opened the American branch of Penguin Books (a UK company) in 1939. Ian was primarily responsible for re-selling Penguins in the United States. However, World War 2 cut off his shipments from the UK, so he began to publish paperbacks himself. One change he made was to add illustrated covers to his paperbacks which were primarily sold through magazine distributors and needed an eye-catching cover to compete. But when Penguin founder Anthony Lane visited the U.S. Penguin offices after the war, he was appalled at these new illustrated covers. He demanded that the paperbacks be simply text and be color-coded like the British Penguins. Ian Ballantine refused and left the company. Ian started his own company with his wife Betty Ballantine and secured funding from a major hardback publi...
Read more

Paperback Cover of the Week: Beowulf, translated by Burton Raffel

                                            Signet classics (2008). Cover design by HAVOC Media Burton Raffel  was a lawyer turned critic and translator. He specialized in poetry and, in addition to writing his own poetry, he translated Mandelstram, Old English poetry, Horace, Cervantes, a Vietnamese poetry collection along with many books on the structure and meaning of poetry. Raffel’s Beowulf was the first version of the poem I read. In my teens and enthralled by Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings, I sought out anything written by Tolkien. His groundbreaking essay, “Beowulf: The Monster and the Critics”, was a little over my head then, so I sought a translation of the poem to read. Burton Raffel’s was the most common (and still is). I read the poem in a day and started a fascination with the Beowulf story that has lasted my whole life. I’ve probably read a dozen translations/ve...
Read more

Ep 18 Patricia Highsmith & The Talented Mr. Ripley

Patricia Highsmith is having a surge of popularity due to the recent TV series “Ripley’ (adapting her novel, “T he Incredible Mr. Ripley”. It is much deserved as her work is unique and unsettling. Most of her major novels (she wrote 22 of them) were written in the 1950s and 1960s and reflect the temper of those times. However, she used her own life, much like a method actor uses memories of their life events, to create characters that are remarkable and troubling. In the podcast, Hal Bodner and I address her troubled life, her views and background as a gay woman and her writing style/themes. We discuss HIghsmith’s masterwork novel, The Incredible Mr. Ripley, a strange crime story told from the point of view of the criminal. Or is he? The short biography was sourced from the excellent bio, “Beautiful Shadow: A Life of Patricia Highsmith" by Andrew Wilson.  Her life was one of sex, alcohol and writing, writing, writing. She also drew, painted, designed and constructed furniture, c...
Read more